Successfully navigating through the economic downturn requires the right strategies, the right investments, and the right partnerships. During a recent visit to Cisco’s San Jose Executive Briefing Center, Telecom Italia‘s senior leadership team shares how they are using this downturn to introduce new managed services and new business models to better serve the Small and Medium business segment and win market share.

We are constantly bombarded with headline ads like these, especially at this time of year, offering us the “lowest” price on just about anything, from cars, to electronics like an ultra-HD Flip video camera, clothing, and even dental work. Black Friday, traditionally known for huge sales, and named for the day that shoppers push retailers into profitability is a great example. In fact, this year in the US, many retailers opened their doors on Thanksgiving Day, at 12:00 midnight aiming to capture early bird shoppers the day beforehand (crazy Americans). With the unsettled state of our economy, many consumers have remained frugal over the past year, and thus the heightened pitch of “best price deals” surrounds us.

What is a great deal? It is really about going back to the basics to determine the total cost of ownership. In the world of Service Provider Infrastructure, a key fact to remember is that the initial price is not the “true” value and accounts for only thirty percent of the total cost.

Increasingly, the topic of social media and digital marketing are surfacing in discussions with my marketing counterparts at our service provider customers around-the-world. In large part because of highly visible “virtual, viral, visual” launch effort we’ve done in the past with such products as ASR 9000 and continuing discussion efforts we have around such efforts as this SP360 blog and our mobility community, we’re being asked on our lessons learned and guidance we can give to others looking to adopt similar approaches. To be honest, while we’ve made some strong strides in social media and are more than willing to share our perspectives with our customers, we most certainly admit that we too have very much learn as well. And in the spirit of Cisco’s culture, we’re always striving for continual improvement.

So, to that end, let’s learn together.

To kick things off, on this forum we’re going to start a regular series for this blog that we’re calling, Conversations in Social Media for Services Providers. In it, we’ll bring to you the perspectives with some of the leading thinkers and experimenters in social media and digital marketing, and ask for your thoughts to continue the conversation.

Murali Nemani, Director of Video Solutions at Cisco Systems, speaks with Stacy Spognardi, Cisco, at the NewTeeVee event in San Francisco, CA about how fragmentation is impacting the video industry. He discusses how the convergence of Pay TV and online video is the wave of the future.

As Bob Dylan once sang, “The Times They Are a-Changin.” Change, however, comes with new challenges, and with something the size of the global telephone network, change takes time. Many think the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and Internet are separate things, yet the Internet was built upon PSTN infrastructure for its transmission. Decades ago, experts could see that data over voice networks would transition to voice over data networks once voice/data volumes inverted. That inversion occurred in 2000 and foretold Internet dominance as the fundamental network approach.

In 2000, the main telephony standards groups realized they needed to embrace Internet Protocol (IP) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) technologies and stopped working on Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) based technologies of the past, but they had a problem. 100 years of building telephone networks connecting billions of people world-wide with 5-9’s reliability was the bench-mark against which any new voice service would be measured. Now voice would be competing with an explosion of new data applications for transport resources in the network. Further exacerbating the issue, bandwidth-consuming video applications would be provided by not only the network provider (e.g. IPTV) but also by competing over-the-top (OTT) service providers.

Some of the individuals posting to this site, including the moderators, work for Cisco Systems. Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors, not of Cisco. The content is provided for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement or representation by Cisco or any other party. This site is available to the public. No information you consider confidential should be posted to this site. By posting you agree to be solely responsible for the content of all information you contribute, link to, or otherwise upload to the Website and release Cisco from any liability related to your use of the Website. You also grant to Cisco a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable (including rights to sublicense) right to exercise all copyright, publicity, and moral rights with respect to any original content you provide. The comments are moderated. Comments will appear as soon as they are approved by the moderator.